Topic: That country where you can buy bitcoin cheaper than selling it... (Read 296 times)

Venezuela is not a stable country.
This sounds like a "Get dead quick" scheme  

It is actually a hard chore to enable a credit card for international use, you need to use the official USD auctioning site, which very few people manage to obtain dollars from, but before that you must have a special bank account in USD. To bid in the auction you need a large amount in fiat, which would be locked until the auction ends, and you might not get chosen. When your fiat halves its purchasing power every day, that is not exactly enticing.

The credit card can only be funded from this special bank account, it doesn't matter if you have millions of the local fiat. So if you only managed to obtain $400, and that would be the theoretical max. That doesn't mean the credit card actually has that limit, its usually ridiculously lower as its set in the local fiat (called bolivar soberano, VES). Which means, you probably need to use the credit card multiple times, but wait, there are also daily bank limits you must not exceed or your funds get frozen for questioning where they come from... And the limits are low, like $200 a day.

The official dollar exchange rate comes from this, but they only report the "lowest accredited price of the bid", which is a giant lie as most bidders go close to the street ("illegal") exchange rate, but they always allow a single artificially low bid so they can publish that as the "official exchange rate".

In any case the official auctioning site only serves about 10% of the actual demand for USD in the country.

Of course today the trend continues:



Perhaps it takes longer to complete the loop before the fiat loses its value and you end with less BTC anyway?

Did you know: Last Friday the street USD price was 850ish VES per USD, but today right now it is 1100ish VES per USD? That should give you an idea of the current inflation levels. If we talk about BTC as you can see from my previous captures, Friday was 4 million but its already 5 million today...

They wont be running active listings while not responding because it would look bad for their reputation and also scoring on response time.      The pricing is inaccurate because dollars are not freely available in the country and dollar must be smuggled in so its price accuracy is about the same as various drugs where price varies massively

I read people use jetskies to travel far into the ocean and register their credit card trades there where its not subject to restrictions they might suffer on shore.  So to settle a bill they must leave the country and return with the mans card, hell of a reason to be using crypto instead seems like

I think that such divergences come from two reasons: One you mentioned - hyperinflation, and second, because some companies, or even private traders take a weekend break and they don't update information. (today is Sunday)

Its only for Venezuela people and even thaey are not going to use it since banks have problem with crypto transaction.So it is not much news to be considered you can see this kind of offers with your countries too if you watch your country offers too often.

News outlets have been fooling people here into thinking that people there have massively jumped into Bitcoin or crypto in general. It's just a circus show to sell you articles not containing factual information. Bitcoin doesn't get bills, food, etc, paid, their shitty fiat currency does, and as long as that doesn't change, people are more than willing to convert back to what we consider worth less than the dirt under our shoes.

The real store of values there are life necessities, not whatever crypto or fiat currency.

Other than not being able to do it for whatever reason or getting scammed you also have the fact that you need Venezualan money, I wouldn't hold that for a moment longer than I had to and therefore would never voluntarily hold it to try and facilitate a transaction.

They must either have bills immediately ready to pay or some instant avenue into dollars, but that just offloads the mystery to the dollar seller. But even if toilet paper is worth more I guess you still have to pay for some necessities with it.

Lol its more dangerous to hold their currency right now than holding some scam coin that's 2000th on marketcap.

I understand why would people want to sell bitcoin for cheap there because at this point having bitcoin is more valuable and their money wouldn't lose any value that way instead of keeping the fiat there which loses value all the time and people are literally losing weight because they have hard time feeding themselves and their children.

That's why I think bitcoin could be a savior there for people but it might be too late, whoever had money already spent it and right now the crisis at a point where you can't just buy bitcoins and hope to live with that instead of fiat since everyone is spending every single cent of their money on food anyway.

I think the weird part is who is willing to SELL bitcoin for fiat there ? Like I understand the buyers but sellers must be crazy, maybe people who need money? I don't know.

Well, the trend continues today:

I don't think there's any point in attempting to fathom how markets work in countries with currencies as screwy as Venezuela. As with things like long standing arbitrage 'opportunities', if there's a weird price discrepancy it's not happening out of generosity or fun, some element is broken.

I am not sure how localbitcoins platform works since I have not really used it in my life but these offers seems to be the "best offers" on their platform not the "safest" offers. for example it may be some scammers among them, someone with no history or something like that. you may say "escrow" but people always find a way to abuse anything so I wouldn't be so sure about that either specially with the charge backs that happen when it comes to fiat.

in my experience whenever there is a price difference that offers arbitrage opportunities, someone is already doing it and it won't last and if the opportunity is around for a moderate amount of time then it means it is a fake opportunity meaning something is wrong at the heart of it that makes it unprofitable.

I think that only rich people(if there are any) in Venezuela can benefit from this "buy low,sell high" market situation.I don't have bolivars,I don't want to buy them,because their value might decrease pretty fast.
Perhaps some corrupted government officials can avoid the US restictions and make some quick profits with btc.

You need a Venezuelan bank account and you'd need to regularly make international bank transfers to it. The United States (and possibly others) have passed economic sanctions that affect Venezuela. I would be hesitant to do this.....banks might freeze your money and report you to the Treasury Department.

We're also only talking about 1K-2K BTC in daily volume. That's not a huge amount of liquidity for you to use.

Have you ever wanted to see, Buy price lower than Sell price? Well today you can:

https://localbitcoins.com/country/VE


This is not the first time i have seen this. It doesn't usually last long, but this is the kind of distortion hyperinflation does to a country.

Insta buy low sell high?

Granted, messing with this country is not recommended. The amount of weird restrictions you will face can easily make you lose your investment, but still, don't think because the majority of tx on localbitcoins belong to this country means the Venezuelans are doing them...

What could possibly go wrong?